It’s easy to assume that when an ideological system is developed it will function much like a machine and only occasionally require adjustments and fine-tuning to incorporate newfound knowledge and changing circumstances.
A different understanding could be more true: ideology is akin to a biological organism in a constant state of change and evolving toward a singular logical conclusion that will ultimately be the death of the ideological organism itself. Since organisms die, so too should ideology, which is passed on from one organism to another in an altered and constantly changing state by generational succession. Ideological self-replication will develop a cancer that will grow by the generation until it is dead.
Of course, it is not possible for an ideology to remain constant if it has any adherents, but we do know that ideology, developed with mechanisms to resist change such as religion, dies at a slowed rate.
Christianity is still around, albeit far from its original conception after two millennia.
Liberalism in comparison is on its death bed after only fifteen generations. The mechanisms of self-preservation that perpetuated liberalism have failed, and the ideology has turned on itself in the pursuit of seeking its own logical conclusion. The difference between liberalism and Christianity regarding this concept is that liberalism encourages change through rationality, which has induced evolution at a hyper rate toward its inevitable death.
Developing an ideological system without mechanisms to resist change gives cautious conservatives little to no defensible ground to stand on. It will be difficult for the conservative to argue the negative and maintain the status quo against the progressive that argues the next logical evolution take place immediately.
I am not proposing big-C ideological Conservatism; sometimes change is necessary and a resilient ideology must be able to adapt to a changing environment. Evolution is good, necessary, and inevitable, but sometimes it’s bad, especially when it is not necessary.
What I am proposing are two mechanisms to be incorporated as integral parts of any ideology:
(1) Ideological mechanisms to resist change
Mechanisms to resist change are found all throughout Christianity. The most important is that the Bible is the literal word of God. That in itself is compelling enough to stave off the winds of change; would you defy the word of God? Revelation chapter 22 is a fiery condemnation to Hell for any who dare alter the word of God. Colossians chapter two is an explicit warning to Christians to hold to the teachings of Christ when confronted with worldly matters. There is much more, but as you can see, Christianity comes with at least a couple of mechanisms to resist change.
There is a similar pattern among successful religions to have these sort of mechanisms, as there is with Confucianism, which coincidentally has had two millennia of success.
(2) Ideological fail-safe mechanisms
A fail-safe mechanism is a response that would be triggered in the event of any negative outcome or catastrophic failure as the result of an ideological implementation. Organisms have this as a built-in response due to part of their own physiology, but all too often ideology can override that fail-safe.
If you were to touch a hot stove, your response would be to jerk your hand away from it. That’s a physiological fail-safe mechanism. Now, imagine if you were convinced that touching a hot stove was not harmful but good for you. Would you still keep your hand on it? It would depend on how committed you are. Liberalism has had similar results to keeping your hand on a hot stove. Yet, arguably no fail-safe has been triggered. An ideological fail-safe is a crisis of faith, and there may be a way to induce it early on in the event of negative outcomes, instead of when it is too late.
With hindsight, the logical evolution of liberalism is clearer. It is, however, much more difficult to have the foresight to predict the ideological steps and conclusions of an emerging ideology.
Prediction of logical outcomes from the tenets of an ideology is a subject worth exploring. Liberals failed to follow their premise toward conclusions and failed to develop safeguards to prevent ideology run disastrously errant.
If there is anything that can be learned from their failures, it’s that prudence is a virtue.
Are we as reactionaries doomed to be stuck in the pastoral mindset marked by yearning for lost or unattained(or is it?) utopia with an updated version of the romanticized 1950s or even going back ?
“I am not proposing big-C ideological Conservatism; sometimes change is necessary and a resilient ideology must be able to adapt to a changing environment. Evolution is good, necessary, and inevitable, but sometimes it’s bad, especially when it is not necessary.”
Neoreaction is about a vision for the future.
The difference between liberalism and Christianity regarding this concept is that liberalism encourages change through rationality,..
By rationality, do you mean positivism, verificationism and other ideas The Enlightenment
I’ll skip the purely grammatical and clarity problems with this article as they can be fixed.
Christianity is still around albeit far from its original conception after two millennia
A) Where did we agree to speak of religions as ideologies? B) Who *says* Christianity is “far” from its original conception (conceived by whom? how far is “far”?);
The idea that the Bible is the word of God is a change-resistant mechanism is at once plausible and PRECISELY wrong. The Bible, like all written documents, is open to interpretation. The Bible being especially diverse in authorship, scope, and audience is SUPREMELY open to interpretation. Novel interpretations are at least as likely to promote ideological change, as traditional interpretations might be used to prevent it. What is required is an authoritative interpreter (usually seen as The Church). Without that, you either get the sectarian splits of protestantism or rabbinical Judaism (but I repeat myself).
I hate to go all Reactionary Future on your asses (but I’m gonna go all Reactionary Future on your asses)… It seems this article is advocating for a sort of institutional algorithmic government. And insofar as any algorithm is built by man, it may be subverted by man. And it’s a good thing too because it comes down to human judgement whether any algorithm continues to serve the purposes it was written for, or whether those purposes might have changed.
I consider ideological stability to be a long solved problem: The Catholic (or Orthodox) Church. Where they have failed to provide for ideological stability (and please note my displeasure with having to use that phrase), it came down to institutions lacking power to police themselves.
So the question of ideological stability is, I think, really a question of ownership and the power to enforce ownership, and not about failsafes and algorithms at all.
The article could have been clearer that social technology operating in a vacuum is pointless. More or less, the article describes a couple mechanisms that Great Men can use in keeping ideologies intact.
I dunno, The ideological failsafe mechanism that Baylor suggests is: where the ideology (“stoves aren’t hot”) runs up against reality (“stoves are used for cooking and therefore hot”). Well, if reality is the failsafe, then why have the ideology at all. I’m trying to imagine an ideological failsafe that doesn’t bump against say… hot stoves… and yet remains a failsafe; and the only thing that comes to mind is some sort of constitutional arrangement, which I consider to be algorithmic. It’s a deal between men, and it’s only gonna work as a deal between men as long as those men hold power over the arrangement and continue to agree to the deal. Whereupon, we’re no longer concerned about failsafes, but the men involved.
My only dispute here is that it isn’t the supposed inerrancy of the scriptures that prevented or checked drift. In fact, the era in which the scriptures were most widely held as inerrant, and that inerrancy was taken as a check against human misinterpretation and drift from the original teachings of the apostles that the drift was fastest and most destructive. This may be circumstantial, but in history it’s generally the bishops that are the cause or check of drift. This makes sense, since from the very beginning the episcopos (overseers) were indeed entrusted with this task, that is, to check the teachings of different congregations to make sure they weren’t drifting. This is clearly discernible from the supposed inerrant text itself. The primary question in hand thus is how the view of scripture affects the decisions and activities of those entrusted with the actual task of resisting change / adapting and answering new challenges. It’s obvious a general claim of inerrancy on the part of the scriptures did not replace their role sufficiently; that is not to say merely having bishops = no bad changes. Like its sister, Democracy, the result is direction by phantoms. In some situations it was believed and widely hoped that at least one of those phantoms was the Holy Spirit, and as such, most were afraid to contemn it in case they blasphemed against the Spirit. A lovely error for sure, inerrancy.
It is perhaps the case that we have ‘inerrancy’ because Bishops failed at their role in some places and times. But to hold this up as an ideal is like a person missing a leg upholding their legless state as befitting since they were foolish enough to step into a woodchipper. Certainly a prosthetic leg would not be unheard of, but limp on, Democracy and Sola Scriptura.
NBS above is right about the problems of algorithmic governance, but I think the author is just focusing on — so to speak — certain social technologies to be deployed by a human actor. The way of thinking about this problem is correct.
I take issue with the application of ‘ideology’ as it pertains to Christianity’s fundamental essence. There is an ideological component, but it is undergirded by something more permanent, what Dávila called the “sacred shades upon the eternal hills”. This puts a stop gap underneath all Traditional religions. When they wear out, they can experience revivals from this principle. We can see this throughout history. While I hate to admit it, Russian Orthodoxy had run out of steam by the time the Bolsheviks arrived to unleash terror upon the country. I read somewhere that when mandatory Church attendance was lifted from the military, 2/3 ceased attendance. However, after 60 odd years of communist purges, the Church is on the rebound, thanks to a number of useful factors. This would not be possible without some transcendent baseline that acts as a preserver. People wish to return to sacred ideas again and again, like the man in a wide desert who may only venture so far before he needs to return to a central oasis. The purpose of ancillary structures is to stop people wandering away in the first place.
“The difference between liberalism and Christianity regarding this concept is that liberalism encourages change through rationality, which has induced evolution at a hyper rate toward its inevitable death.”
Of course, the difference go FAR FAR beyond this, but I do agree with you that rationalization has made Liberalism ‘holiness combustible’, with an ever-increasing rate of entropy that like a vortex will drown entire civilizations in its ideological jihad. Maistre did warn us.
“The most important is that the Bible is the literal word of God.”
It isn’t the Quran, an I agree with Nick’s statement above about ‘open to interpretation’. There is one correct interpretation and it is how the Church understood the faith when she was healthy. Moves away from this have been unhealthy. What should be alluded to is that the Bible, unlike certain other religious texts, is rather open ended in useful areas such as the application of civil law. One of the troubles I think Islam would have in converting Europeans is that I think you’d find it absolutely impossible to get them to accept Sharia Law without compromise. It’s just not in their blood.
As to the general point #1, this is just the sociopolitical nature of religion. It is necessary, and it is ever-present, just at different levels of health. To speak of an irreligious civilization is at base, a contradiction in terms.
Now, point #2: This is broadly about holiness spiralling, right? When things get out of hand, where is the stop/rewind button? Liberalism clearly lacks this (I’d call this part of its inherently demonic nature), but I don’t think Traditional religions generally suffer from this at all.
Yes, religions do holiness spiral, that is where we get the term, but this is almost always the result of some kind of particular conflagration in history, and then the toppling of an established religious authority, whereas with Liberalism its like necrotizing fasciitis. Such things are not intrinsic to religions themselves, but are just part of nature as it is. People get pious, make mistakes, etc. The ways to prevent these things (and nothing is ever airtight) are as follows:
A) Predict possible negative outcomes of religious doctrinal points long before they are reached. I am toying with the theory that the Reformation might never have happened if St. Anselm’s theory of atonement had not taken over from the earlier Roman Catholic understanding of the crucifixion, but nobody looked ahead.
B) Have a strong political force that can respond to these internal threats. Germany really lacked this, and few outside were willing to help until it was too late.
C) Never under any circumstances let technology get ahead of you without you knowing the consequences of said technology. It will be used against you by potential holiness gurus. i.e – the printing press and the Roman Catholic Church, or more recently, Twitter and the Conservative establishment.
One thing I want to say is that it is very useful for an authority, religious or otherwise, to be able to stoke up a general climate of fear and the sense of being cornered. Russia has existed under this condition since the invasion of Crimea in particular, and it has been very deliberately implemented. This has completely lowered the portcullis and resulted in a nationwide ‘rally around the flag’ effect. Obviously it is unhealthy for this climate to perpetuate, but when a threat emerges, external or more cynically internal, elites are wise to be able to deploy it. People will say this sounds like 1984 stuff, but it really is just what societies have been doing throughout history, it is temporary, and preserves stability in an emergency situation.
Ideology is secular and materialistic, religion is transcendent and spriritual.
I wrote the article and didn’t expect so many people to so strongly disagree with it. The intent of the article was to describe ideological drift and suggest a couple of ways it could be stalled. It’s a real phenomenon and nothing stays the same. You can watch the rapid change of liberalism unfold through a few decades. You can see how Christianity has changed in the modern era to accommodate a liberal worldview. It happens on both a micro and macro scale. If you conceive an idea and pass it onto another person that idea will be altered from just passing between you and another person. If you extrapolate that up to the macro you can see how it happens on mass scale and then alters from one generation to the next. Look at folk tales for example.
Here’s a thought experiment. You’re a missionary and you bring Christianity to a tribe of uncontacted primitives and teach them how to read and write. Will those people have the same understanding of Christianity as you or the same as your people back home? If you conclude the same as me therefore Christianity isn’t immune to change and isn’t preserved in stasis.
I only mentioned Christianity because it has existed for so long and there’s elements that could be derived from it as a fundamental building block of future political ideology. Another reason is I’ve been reading Robert Lewis Dabney and he had a very different understanding of Christianity than the modern mainline church would have.
And Dabney would have a wildly different understanding of Christianity than Thomas Aquinas,
The goal is NOT to preserve ideologies, but to preserve essential institutional integrity. This is what was lost, in my view, in the Reformation.